ATI RV770 Mesa DRI Driver Started

AMD has yet to go through their final intellectual property review on the R600/700 3D documentation that could yield open ATI R600/700 3D graphics by Christmas (though the chances of this happening are slimming), but Novell's Hatthias Hopf has provided a status update to report that they have internally begun work on an RV770 DRI driver for Mesa.

Matthias and Alex Deucher have now been successful in running r600_demo (a very basic 3D test program) on the RV770 GPUs (Radeon HD 4800 series) in the same way as the Radeon HD 2000/3000 series. The Hopf-Deucher duo along with the two other AMD engineers that report to John Bridgman have started work on the Mesa DRI driver that will allow open-source OpenGL acceleration for these new ATI graphics cards.

As no documentation or code has yet to be cleared by AMD's legal department, all of this code is being worked on privately. The progress report from Matthias can be read on his blog.